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We have recently started a weblog of images of various Owls and Owl-related human cultural representations, with minimal commentary. This project began as a casual parody of the contemporary art-scene weblog www.VVORK.com.

This guy is asking you to send him pennies minted in 1968. He will add it to his collection of other 1968 pennies and put you name on the contributors' list. The current total is 9,887 pennies.

Won't you please help him in this worthy endeavor?

The 1968 penny collection began on September 27th, 1999 with just a single 1968 penny, and over the years it has steadily grown both in size and the number of contributors.

The goal of this website is to keep the collection growing indefinitely by soliciting 1968 pennies from as many people as possible. This is a group effort.

Everybody who contributes pennies to the 1968 penny collection will be featured on this website.

Quality and condition of pennies is unimportant, as all certifiable 1968 pennies (whether uncirculated & shiny, or well-worn & grimy) are accepted and added to the collection equally.

All pennies are 100% 1968 guaranteed, and this collection is never to be cashed in, as its value as a collector's item is greater than its monetary value.

Of the 4,858,503,583 pennies minted in 1968, an untold number have been forever lost to history, which is why it is important to save the remaining 1968 pennies NOW while they are still relatively easy to find. If every American donated just one 1968 penny, the collection would number in the hundreds of millions.

Craig sends in this "video of Charlie Stross's visit to Google's headquarters where he gave a reading of his book, 'Halting State'." Halting State -- a novel about a heist in a multiplayer online role-playing game -- is one hell of a fantastic book and Charlie's a GREAT reader.
Link
(Thanks, Craig!)

If you're in the UK, please help petition the Prime Minister to abandon plans to create the Information Sharing Index, a national database of all children between birth and eighteen.

How many parents are aware that the DfES is planning a huge national database of every child in the UK? As well as their names and addresses, it will also hold parent's contact details and the name and contact details of every education, health and social care practitioner that children come into contact with. At this stage we don't know exactly who will be able to access that information, but the plan is that practitioners will be able to contact each other to share information without parental consent. Parents will no longer have the right to act as gatekeeper and your child's privacy and the right to withhold information about their education, health and social welfare will be lost completely. Remember, this will effect every child, not just children deemed to be 'at risk'. Could this be a national identity scheme by the back door? Once a child has been given a unique ID in a database such as this, how easy will it be for the Government to keep that ID after the age of 18?

And in all the protest about Contactpoint, let's hope that the other national database, eCAF, doesn't quietly slip through. A national system containing the in-depth personal assessments of 50% of children is even more dangerous.

If you're intrested in these types of issues in the UK you should check out the Open Rights Group.

Austrian tech-art-pranksters Monochrom show us how to hack into the human brain using a vintage calculator, duct tape, a USB drive, and some pickled onions (preferably Romanian). Then, Mark shows us how to make a very simple motor -- another fun project from scitoys.com.

Link to video for this episode, and full text of blog post with comments.

Jason Thomas of Red Rocket Farm and nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot have just released their video for his latest single, "Bizarro Genius Baby." This is one of my favorite tracks off the last Frontalot album, and the video is awesome.
Link
(Thanks, Frontalot!)

The Board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has reinstated Andrew Burt as chairman of its copyright committee, despite the recommendations of the group that was chartered to investigate SFWA's work on copyright in the wake of August's illegal and damaging campaign against the text-hosting site Scribd.

Last August, Andrew Burt, the vice president of SFWA, sent a list of thousands of works that he alleged violated the copyrights of Robert Silverberg and the Isaac Asimov estate. This list was compiled by searching the Scribd site for the words "asimov" and "silverberg" and it included my own novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a teacher's guide to great science fiction for young readers, and the entire back-catalog of a science fiction magazine whose editors had placed their work on Scribd. Burt sent an email to Scribd's management in which he said that this list wasn't "idle musing, but a DMCA notice."

In the ensuing debacle, Burt (who's position as SFWA vice president is the result of an uncontested ballot) repeatedly claimed that his list contained "three errors" -- the real number was more like dozens, if not hundreds, of innocents who were accused of being pirates because they had quoted or merely mentioned science fiction writers.

He also singled me out for vilification, suggesting that I had timed my public disclosure of this in order to cause him damage -- I posted the information as soon as I had all the facts, in the middle of the afternoon at the World Science Fiction Convention, after taking the time to talk it over with many fellow writers, including fellow past officers of the organization (I am the former Canadian Director of SFWA). Read the rest

Wael claims that his YouTube account, with which he has posted more than a hundred videos of alleged police abuse, has been terminated over complains the clips contain "inappropriate material."

Abbas said YouTube sent him an e-mail saying they had suspended his account. "They didn't ask me to remove it. They said 'Your account isn't working,' " he said. When asked about Abbas, a YouTube spokesperson said, "We take these matters very seriously, but we don't comment on individual videos."

YouTube regulations state that "graphic or gratuitous violence" is not allowed and violations of the Terms of Use could result in the ending of an account and deleting all of the videos in it.

There are plenty of other video-sharing sites and third-party tools out there for posting viral videos, but Abbas says he's lost his entire archive, the fruit of years of painstaking work. Also this month, Yahoo! accused Abbas of spamming and shut down two e-mail accounts of his.

Link. Here's the post on Wael's blog about the suspension of his Yahoo email account: Link.
(Thanks, Rafe)

Drawn! ran Meomi's fabulous designs for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic mascots. They just need to add a 'frop pipe in that Yeti's mouth and all will be good.

Leave it to Canada to have a cryptozoological beastie like a sasquatch as its Olympic mascot. Earlier today Vancouver 2010 unveiled their Olympic and Paralympic mascots: Quatchi the Sasquatch, Miga the Sea Bear, and Sumi the Thunderbird.

Continuing in BoingBoing's ongoing exploration of highbrow internet cinema, I now present to you a reaction video of some guy's poor grandma seeing the German New Wave classic "Zwei Mädchen eine Tasse" for the first time.

Clearly, she is overwhelmed by the heady metaphysical influence of Fassbinder and Herzog evidenced in this masterwork, which treats its characters in a scope of almost Wagnerian breadth.

(Warning: This is my serious voice now. The reason I will never link directly to the shock video referenced in the title of this post can best be expressed in this equation from BB reader Ivan: 2Girls_1Cup = Goatse * TubGirl / White_Unicorns).

In today's NYT, a feature (with lots of great photos) about folks who build elaborate stereo soundsystems for their bicycles. It's not a new phenomenon, but it's neat to see it treated with such formal examination. Link, and pix here shot for the Times by Tyler Hicks. (thanks, Mark Hurst)
Read the rest

Turkish-born artist Pinar Yolacan, who is based in Brooklyn, is best known for her portraits of ladies wearing clothes fashioned from meat parts (tripe, guts, assorted offal). She has a new show opening today at New York's Rivington Arms gallery. Snip from a Style.com feature:

This time around, the women are Afro-Brazilian, dressed in the style of the Portuguese colonizers, and the organ in question is the placenta of cows. That sounds repulsive, but like Yolacan's earlier photographs, these have a strange and haunting beauty.

She explains why meat is her medium in the Style.com interview...

How, exactly, do you make clothes from meat?

I make the clothes the morning of the shoot, so the meat doesn't rot. In Bahia, I froze it beforehand, so it wouldn't get smelly, because it's really hot. It's quite domestic, really–I have to buy meat, clean up, sew. For this series, I got the fabrics in local markets, and the meat, too. I try to accentuate each woman's skin tone and expression with the clothes; I take Polaroids of them when I first meet them, then I work from those.

OpenRoad.TV, the terrific video travel guide for the American West, joined CRAFT magazine blogger Natalie Zee Drieu and her pooch Lulu as they visited San Francisco's Embarcadero, home to the historic Ferry Building and Claes Oldenburg's huge "Cupid's Span" sculpture. This is the fifth episode in OpenRoad.TV's "Life Outside The Box" series where they're accompanying bloggers to their favorite real world spots. Link
Previously on BB:
• OpenRoad.tv and Pesco visit the Musée Mécanique LinkRead the rest